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What you eat can make a difference if you have been dealing with cancer. The right diet creates a better environment for healing. This is good news, it places more control in your hands than you may have thought possible.
Dr. Keith Block has an integrative approach that embraces nutritional elements of healing. He puts emphasis on development of a healthy, anti-inflammatory diet, heavy on the phytochemicals and micronutrients, and the right kinds of fats.
(Transcribed from video interview)
Dr. Block:
Well, there is a healthy, anti-inflammatory, phytochemically rich, right-fat type of diet, but the problem is, is that there’s also lots of foods out there that have the wrong fats, that are low in phytochemicals that strip the body of antioxidants. And so it’s hard to pick specific foods.
But what I would suggest is that red meats, poultry, milk products, as a rule contain higher amounts of saturated fats and omega-6 fats. And these are fats that drive up inflammation. They unfortunately drive up oxidative stress. And they can actually place a patient in a situation that creates the biology, the biochemical environment to reinforce cancer growth, as opposed to a diet that’s going to reverse that.
Now it’s not just animal foods. Refined, processed, chemicalized foods, particularly a lot of your white flour products, your white sugars, a lot of the processed junk food that we feed our culture and certainly we call it belly water, soda pop, right?
This kind of food ingestion is actually stripping the body of critical micronutrients and phytochemicals and it drives, for different reasons, because of its effects on certain enzymes, it can actually drive up inflammatory tracts and inflammatory molecules.
And what we know is, the more inflammation the patient has, the more that micro-environment is disrupted the more aggressive their cancer can be, the more toxicity they will get from treatment, the less effective the treatments will be, the more potential for complications that can be life threatening, things like clotting and pneumonia and cachexia, inflammatory wasting syndromes and even quality of life because as you eat a poor diet, you actually damage not just your DNA but your mitochondria.
Those are the carburetors of your cell that is responsible for energy. It’s responsible for your vitality. It’s your body’s gasoline store. We call it adenosine triphosphate. And if you have too much oxidative stress or too much inflammation going on, you are going to actually damage those carburetors in your cell and that’s going to lead to a lot of the fatigue that lots of cancer patients experience.
So from my vantage point, dietary choices are fundamental. And that’s not saying that a little tiny bit of this or this is a problem as much as creating an entire system of care, that is really, again tailored to the biochemical environment and the nutritional needs of each patient.
About Dr. Block, M.D.:
Dr. Keith I. Block, M.D., along with his wife Penny Block, M.A., Ph.D., founded the Block Center for Integrative Cancer Treatment in 1980, with a focus on treating the patient as a whole person rather than simply treating the diagnosis. They developed a unique and truly integrative approach to cancer treatment which encompasses traditional and complementary medicine delivered in a caring environment.
Visit Dr. Block at http://www.blockmd.com/aboutus_letter.htm
Video:
https://www.empowher.com/cancer/content/cancer-patients-which-food-should-they-avoid-dr-block-video
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